The amount of data to be acquired in order to develop a feasible remediation technology is vast. Furthermore, environmental engineering has the unfortunate characteristics that no universal technology, applicable to any sort of pollution, can be engineered on principle. As there exist certain synthesis procedures for a chemical, so do only certain methods successfully deplete the chemical from a contaminated site.

However, once developed, remediation technologies based on biological agents, bacteria and fungi being the most commonly applied, represent a viable alternative to chemical and physical methods, mainly due to lower operational costs. Therefore, it is truly of primary interest to acquire sufficient information about microbial processes to allow a more general approach to process design that would consequently lower the price of environmental biotechnology.

Additionally, based on the knowledge of metabolic pathways of recalcitrant pollutants, genetically modified microorganisms can be engineered. A promising example was the transfer of the PCB degradation pathway into indigenous microorganisms as a method to avoid time-consuming adaptation of the degrader to specific conditions of the polluted site.